I’m honestly devastated by just how disappointing this turned out for me. Early 2022 this was my most anticipated game. I loved both games and have been a big fan of Platinum Games work in the past. This should have been my favorite switch game period. So what happened?

Is it Viola, the faildaughter who only exists to make Luka look competent in comparison? While she got on my nerves, I did play this after the most recent patch so she wasn’t nearly as unplayable with her block mechanic as I imagined she was back at launch. She is still immensely inferior as a block focused character compared to Raiden from Revengeance.

Is it the voice actor mess? If anything it helped lower my expectations!

The story? It’s certainly bad, but by making this a multiverse tale, I had no real investment with what happened to this Bayonetta anyway. I didn’t skip any cutscene to give it a chance, but it felt shockingly safe for a series and developer known for doing the unexpected.

My big problem is the combat. I’ve seen people praising this as an equal to the original and I immensely disagree. I don’t think I liked a single new weapon added to this game. It didn’t help that the camera in this entry was so zoomed out in comparison to the first two games, I didn’t get the time to see how weapon combos truly differentiated from each other. The new monster summoning mechanic didn’t feel right either. By having them around at all times, the cool factor of summoning the big monsters drains fast.

I almost considered calling this the Devil May Cry 2 of Bayonetta, but that would be an exaggeration. There were clearly some good ideas in here that couldn’t be delivered on due to a troubled development cycle. While I’m glad this finally came out, I will never play this again.

After 5 years of waiting, Bayonetta 3 is the exemplification of everything I love and hate about Platinum Games, combined with possibly the worst ending of any major video game release since Mass Effect 3.

Even the smallest QOL change of being able to select specific chunks of a chapter that, upon completion, will permenantly overwrite your score with your highest, is as much a blessing to the game as an even heavier overemphasis on setpieces are a curse. For as good as Bayonetta's core combat is, offering her even more weapons to use, and a demon summoning mechanic that's at least better than the second game's Infernal Climax, new character Viola feels half finished and like she was made from Bayonetta's usual katana moveset, with the most annoying parry in gaming history, and Jeanne's stealth sections feeling like a DS game from 2006 that'd be sitting on a Metacritic average of 27. For every fun boss fight with a great cutscene afterwards, there's another that's spent playing as a lumbering demon as the story limps towards a miserable conclusion that can best be described as "Devil May Cry 5 at home".

My disappointment is immense, and my faith in Platinum in a post Babylon's Fall world is forever shaken.